Grindy!

[Jarkko279]

Im thinkin career mode needs some tweaking. Im playing hard and it seems its gonna take me multiple repeating missions to get my launchpad and tracking station to lvl 2. Admin building is currently a joke. Its ridicolous how little u get money from like reputation points. Love the game thou. Been away like six months and it seems like squad has really stepped up a notch.

Miss the update videos:(

Can someone tell me how To cheat money in career mode.. I promise i only use it to upgrade my WAB

[Jarkko279]

Oh. I dont feel like starting new career with more starting funds

[Levelord]

If you open up your KSP folder and head on to the saves folder and your current career save folder inside it, there is a file called 'persistent.sfs'.

Open the file in notepad and Press ctrl + F, then search for the term 'funds'. Once you found it, change the numerical values to whatever you'd like.

What you do in your game with those funds are your business, you should not need to justify how you play your game to complete strangers

[Superfluous J]

The difficulty settings are really mislabeled. "Easy" sould be "Mostly Grind Free" and "Hard" should be "Grindfest." The game isn't really any harder or easier to play in those stages, you just have to do it a lot more before you can get to whatever your personal goals are.

I would suggest doing what Levelord said. You can also start a new game (keep reading I know you said you didn't want to do this) and open up that game's persistent.sfs file in order to copy the settings from one to another, if you want to be sure you're playing on the correct settings for "normal" or "easy" or whatnot. Or just to make sure you're putting reasonable values in there.

[Jouni]

The difficulty settings are really mislabeled. "Easy" sould be "Mostly Grind Free" and "Hard" should be "Grindfest." The game isn't really any harder or easier to play in those stages, you just have to do it a lot more before you can get to whatever your personal goals are.

I don't find 'moderate' grindy at all, at least compared to the career mode that was in the previous versions. The idea of the harder difficulty levels is taking challenging contracts with high rewards, and completing them with facilities that aren't up to the task. If you can't do that, you should switch to an easier difficulty level or customize the difficulty, instead of grinding through less challenging contracts on 'hard'.

[Kruleworld]

If you open up your KSP folder and head on to the saves folder and your current career save folder inside it, there is a file called 'persistent.sfs'.

That's cheating

[SpaceSphereOfDeath]

That's cheating

You could also use the debug menu to get more funds.

For those who don't know: press alt F12 in the space centre view, hold them BOTH down for 5 seconds, a set of buttons will pop up, allowing the adding and removing of funds, science, and rep.

[Jarkko279]

If you open up your KSP folder and head on to the saves folder and your current career save folder inside it, there is a file called 'persistent.sfs'.

Open the file in notepad and Press ctrl + F, then search for the term 'funds'. Once you found it, change the numerical values to whatever you'd like.

What you do in your game with those funds are your business, you should not need to justify how you play your game to complete strangers

Yeah. It was more of a joke.

[eddiew]

The difficulty settings are really mislabeled. "Easy" sould be "Mostly Grind Free" and "Hard" should be "Grindfest." The game isn't really any harder or easier to play in those stages, you just have to do it a lot more before you can get to whatever your personal goals are.

Very true; even at 50% funding you can still make almost all missions profitable, it's just the margins that reduce. (And if a mission isn't profitable; reject it!)

Although I firmly believe in dropping the science slider down low to encourage going out into the solar system to earn that high tier tech. 20-30% makes you yearn for those bigger multipliers on other planets long before you've got nuclear engines

[Jarkko279]

I Can do a lot. But its just not fun to do a mun flyby when part limit is 30. And u need to grind pretty Much just to enable EVA. Im sure its bossible mun land with 30 parts. But not fun. Atleast not for me.

[Jouni]

I Can do a lot. But its just not fun to do a mun flyby when part limit is 30. And u need to grind pretty Much just to enable EVA. Im sure its bossible mun land with 30 parts. But not fun. Atleast not for me.

Getting things done with less resources is the only hard thing in the game. If you allow reasonable part count and vehicle mass limits for the mission you're attempting, the game can only be easy or grindy for an experienced player.

[Wallygator]

I'm just finishing up a "Highly grindy" (Hard) mode career (actually custom as I enable revert and quick save to offset the ongoing osx anomalies)

My Observations:

- Its not that "hard" just laborious.

- The part count, weight and navigation limitations really do add some really entertaining early game challenges - there is great possibility here for greater balancing and associated fun. The 18 ton 30 part mun missions are a real hoot and quite fulfilling when they work out - frustrating when they don't.

- Once I complete the tech tree (2 more nodes to go) then what? Still a lot of science to gain for sure, but how best to leverage that? Perhaps I could enact a few strategies that let me convert science points for money, but that seems trite when considering what should now evolve into an endgame focused on complex and long term exploration.

-Finally, finding ways to fund your fantastic missions is going to be really quite a chore, as eventually the "test everything everywhere for a few thousand funds" and "plant your 1000th flag will erode your brain and interest. Fine Print clearly adds width the sea of contracts, but it does't add much depth.

Perhaps once you complete the tech tree in career mode you might be given an option (in game) to cover the save to a science only sandbox. Just a thought.

[Daid]

I Can do a lot. But its just not fun to do a mun flyby when part limit is 30. And u need to grind pretty Much just to enable EVA. Im sure its bossible mun land with 30 parts. But not fun. Atleast not for me.

Pretty sure I did a moon landing with the 30 part limit. Only thing I upgraded was the launchpad, as the 18t limit was giving me issues there. Didn't have to use patched conics (burn at mun rising as we did pre-patched conics)

[FiesesAlien]

Heyho.

I also see Easy/Normal/Hard just as "Not really Grindy" "Not so Grindy" "Very Grindy". Iam a not so expierienced player but i think i should start a career with exactly adjustements (aka Custom Difficulty) how i want it. BUT! I like Career Mode a lot, its just a thing to watch a bit out for your resources and yes i use the Science-OP-Strategy because all other Strategys are ... giving ... absolutely ... nothing ... mean... what the heck? =)

Lets see the future of Carreer Mode Iam loking forward to! (Freedom! lalalala la la la!)

Stay crunchy and have sweet holidays.

[Torquemadus]

The game can be as grindy as you want it to be. In custom difficulty, by adjusting the funds penalties slider, you can adjust the upgrade costs of the buildings.

Edited December 24, 2014 by Torquemadus

[Greep]

Well, I think the game isn't really grindy if you play at your level. There's always contracts that anyone can do at any difficulty level for profit, you're just not supposed to do the easy ones on hard. E.g. on my first play through on hard in .90 (and I've played about two hundred hours so I started with a bit of experience), hard was pretty grindy, I had like two dozen launches before I could get to duna. But on my second try, I was already interstellar by about 8 launches in, with one of them doing explore jool/bop/pol and temperature scans for over a million credits. So not grindy at all!

Honestly, I think it's better to just completely ignore difficulty, and just do the hardest set of contracts you can do every launch with one ship. Choose a difficulty where there are contracts you can't do or ones you can only barely do, so you push yourself IMO, it would be better if they just completely did away with the reputation system so you always have a choice of difficult contracts.

Edited December 24, 2014 by Greep

[Aragosnat]

Would also be nice to get rid of the science gains within the contracts too. Would give even moar reason to go out and hit other planets.

[Janos1986]

I'm playing Hard too, with permadeath and no quickload/revert, and in a week I unlocked lv2 mission control, VAB, runway, administration, tracking station and all the first tier of tech tree. It's a bit grindy at the beginning yeah, but with the first two strategies active it all evens out, especially with aerial surveys and satellites.

[Norpo]

Would also be nice to get rid of the science gains within the contracts too. Would give even moar reason to go out and hit other planets.

This.

Also, I think the key to difficulty is not "Do moar contracts!", but being forced to do harder contracts. After all, you COULD do 10 "put satellite around blah" contracts, or you could do a giant Duna mission, with limits on engineering, having to cobble together a rocket, and hoping it works, and when it DOES, you'll be welcomed home as heroes, or die trying. Nobodies going to hail you as a hero if you do a really easy mission, 10, maybe 40 times. This is really the ultimate gameplay balance question. It's *really* hard to do proper difficulty, without making a hundred special cases for each difficulty.

Challenge the player, or let them fail trying, is what I say. (of course, if you DO like the easier contracts, there's always Normal mode.) The closest thing to these, I think are the Asteroid contracts. Extremely hard to do, but when they work, they pay big.

tl;dr gameplay balance, and making difficulty without adding grindy elements is hard.

[ghpstage]

Im sure its bossible mun land with 30 parts.

The parts limit isn't an issue for a long time, you get to the Mun, Minmus, Duna, Ike, Gilly and other things with that!

The real problem is the 18t weight limit. Its a major blocker to getting manned missions anywhere for quite some time.

Probes to go carry out exploration missions on any planet can be done comfortably with those restrictions, and ones to reach the Mun, Minmus, Duna, Eve and their moons can be built very early.

In the case of Mun exploration, it can be done very early indeed, this is a battery powered probe that landed on the Mun, only needing 110 science. The Mun being a nice target as its easy to encounter, near enough for 14 batteries to be sufficient, and you need to do a part of the contract before anywhere else or you'll kill their contracts.

That battery powered Stayputnik drone managed to land on the Mun. It only cost around 110 science to build it too.

It would be nice to have both harder missions, and more missions that represent progression, like manned missions to various bodies after basic exploration. The altitude ones, orbit and exploration ones are the only ones I know of that do this right now.

Edited December 25, 2014 by ghpstage

[CalculusWarrior]

I find the No More Grind mod perfectly reduces the facilities' prices to something comfortable. The buildings unlock at much more reasonable times for me, and I don't have to do seven thousand surveys just to gather the money necessary.

[Rune]

The game can be as grindy as you want it to be. In custom difficulty, by adjusting the funds penalties slider, you can adjust the upgrade costs of the buildings.

http://i.imgur.com/ZGrxJCK.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/m02hEXO.jpg

Yup, and that is a weird dependency indeed. I found out by trying to set up a new career with normal settings, but tweaked with higher penalties for failure, like no respawn and a higher fund hit if you can't accomplish a given contract. Just because my last career at only 50% everything was grindy enough. But then I had to just quit it, because there is no way I grind my way into 1.5 MILLION funds to get the Tier II science and new parts, when I already have the rest of Tier I unlocked, no money spent on other facilities, 100% reuse throughout the save, and a mere 500k funds saved up. No. Freaking. Way.

So I edited myself back to 100% penalties. I think a new slider for building cost would be in order, some people want failure to have real, lasting consequences, like wiping out hard-earned reserves you have to re-build up over a long time. Without requiring me to do a hundred survey missions to upgrade the building to Tier II, that would be nice.

Rune. I actually found out the real cost of building from YouTube... but I had a suspicion that if I was finding issues upgrading the astronaut complex alone, people should have been freaking out already.

[Kesa]

Hard mode is fine. If you don't want to grind, go to the mun without patched conics. Hey, it's hard mode. Or go custom mode and reduce penalities.

[cantab]

So I edited myself back to 100% penalties. I think a new slider for building cost would be in order, some people want failure to have real, lasting consequences, like wiping out hard-earned reserves you have to re-build up over a long time. Without requiring me to do a hundred survey missions to upgrade the building to Tier II, that would be nice.

Agreed. I'd venture that "costs" and "penalties" should be completely separated, to allow a hard mode that's punishing of failure without being excessively grindy.

But really, I think it's more that hard mode with .90 seems to have caught people out, because suddenly it is a challenge even for an experienced players, in a way it wasn't in .25. People have been doing low-tech missions for ages, people have been doing ultra-light missions for ages, but suddenly the 18/30 limit challenges you to do both, and that's something else.